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Monday, April 5, 2010

City wants Chasse deal kept secret

And the family of the young man killed by police brutality isn't playing along, at least not so far. Portland could really use a full trial of the lawsuit, but at the very least it needs a truly open and transparent settlement of the case. Anything less, and this poor fellow died mostly in vain.

When you're in disgrace, the best thing to do is pay your dues and move on. How rarely that happens at Portland City Hall.

Comments (8)

I saw a solution to this out of Cincinnati. Their police department has been trying out tiny cameras mounted right on the officer's head. That way what really happened is right there to see.
If we can spend a fortune on some condo deal, why can't we try that?

Why can't we try that? Now there's a straight line! Okay, here goes:
• Neither Mayor nor Police Chief interested in sifting through that much strip club footage.
• Because we're waiting for the even tinier cameras to be mounted in the officer's head.
• Police ability to sense being disrespected not something you can just replace with a machine, man.
• Too heavy. Make head wobble.
• Would reveal motorcycle cops' secret butchy pick-up lines to enemy combatants.
• Hot coffee just fogs up lenses
• Would require officers to demand of one another that they turn their cameras off, and then taser each other for not complying.

When they first put vid cams in patrol cars they had to armor both the wires and boxes because they somehow got damaged frequently. Also because this would be a union bargainer issue the Po Po would need a lot more money and vacation time to accept body cams.

If 5 officers were involved at a police shooting and all 5 cameras mysteriously failed that would say something on its own.
Look, I know the idea of recording what an officer sees feels like another huge step in the surveillance state.
But when an officer is looking at something, that is already a representative of the state there watching you. Only now the judicial system lets the officers tell us what you did. The public can sometimes hear a checklist emerge - the necessary elements to justify the officer interacting with the citizen in the first place and then how it escalated into the officer using force on the citizen.
There have been instances when those reports and accounts differ from reality when a videotape emerges. But what would happen if the officers knew they were being taped to begin with? Wouldn't that be a deterrent against abuses of power?
I bet the officers in the Rodney King case would have acted differently if they knew they were being videotaped.

Every once in a while in litigation one runs into a judge with cojohones, who tells insurers that no settlement with a gag order will be approved.

Gag orders usually apply to the amount of a settlement. Given that City Council will have to approve any settlement amount in open session, the usual gag order as to settlement amounts would never apply.

That the CoP (City of Portland) wants to preclude additional distribution of any discovery material produced is very troubling.

Again though, there are judges (especially federal judges, who don't have to run for re election and needent worry about insurer funded election challenges as in Texas or West Virginia or Oregon) who won't tolerate that kind of bull, restricting public access to discovery documents produced.

And there are Federal judges who will not allow entry of settlement agreements that are not fair to plaintiffs. Its happened in the SDNY twice, with two different judges, this year, since January 1.

Interestingly, there is a provision of the Oregon Constitution, Article I, Section 10, which arguably makes any gag order in state court unconstitutional.

Then again as Charley Crookham used to comment, "Federal judges have it easy. They don't need to think about re election."

Road Work

Miles run year to date: 80
At this date last year: 89
Total run in 2014: 401
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In 2011: 113
In 2010: 125
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In 2003: 269